Current NASA Administrator Mike Griffin and former astronaut Owen K.
Garriot (et al) wrote a paper called
"Extending Human Presence into the Solar System" (July 2004, Planetary Society) that
strongly suggests how President Bush's Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) is
likely to be carried out. I read this paper, and to my surprise, liked it,
despite the fact that several things about it are counter-intuitive to me.
Ronald J. Kohl brought up the point in an email that the Crew Exploration Vehicle
(CEV) architecture proposed by Griffin is designed to carry people all the way
from Earth launch to the Moon on the same vehicle; it does not deliver people to
some "staging area" such as Low Earth Orbit (LEO) in one specialized vehicle and
then carry them onwards on a different specialized vehicle, as I would have
expected.

Griffin's plan, like the Apollo program, has little use for infrastructure
associated with LEO. This comes after NASA has spent the last three decades
wrestling with LEO infrastructure in the form of the Space Shuttle and the
International Space Station (ISS). One reaction I had to the plan is that I was
taken aback by the sudden and thorough change of emphasis away from LEO to
regions beyond. The Space Shuttle Orbiters (the winged, reusable, manned
component) are soon to be retired, and nothing remotely like them is on NASA's
horizon. The ISS is being de-emphasized as much as possible given NASA's
international treaty obligations.

Nor does Griffin's plan build very much infrastructure on the Moon. It
visits the Moon eventually, before visiting Mars, after first visiting Lagrange
points, near-Earth asteroids, and the moons of Mars. It is vulnerable to the
same criticism made of Apollo, that it didn't leave us with infrastructure with
which to build permanent settlements. Another of my reactions to the paper was
pleasant surprise at this. Given the current economic infeasibility of
permanent space settlements, this lack of infrastructure makes sense, but it
rubs many of us space enthusiasts the wrong way, who have been dreaming of, and
expecting such settlements Real Soon Now ever since July 19th, 1969.

A third reaction was discomfort at the use of the word,
"exploration,"1
which is presented as the central purpose of the manned space program. If this
means exploration in the fashion of Christopher Columbus or James Cook (two
Orbiters are named after Cook's ships), it seems hopelessly inarticulate at best.
As James van
Allen put it, manned space enthusiasts' analogies to Christopher Columbus
vary from "incompetent" to "massively deceitful," depending on how much thought
goes into them. We know too much about the inner solar system already, and know
too much about building robots, to be able to use these analogies honestly. I
will argue shortly that Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic solo flight is a better
analogy for the Vision for Space Exploration than Columbus's voyages, but I don't
really think of Lindbergh as an "explorer."

A fourth reaction was to think of the flight of Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne,
and of his plans for future vehicles to serve the suborbital space tourism
market. These sorts of flights are analogous to the "barnstorming" period in
the early days of aviation. Again, Charles Lindbergh comes to mind, but there
is no clear relationship between Rutan and the VSE.

I am probably like most space enthusiasts both in having a generally
favorable reaction to the VSE and Mike Griffin, and in being argumentative and
conflicted about it. I think much of this conflict stems from conflicting,
poorly articulated historical analogies and expectations ("models," "visions,"
and "paradigms") about how the conquest of space can best proceed. Here, then,
are some of the analogies that seem to be affecting people's thinking about the
manned space program:

The Manhattan Project. There is some particular piece of breakthrough
technology that the government needs to develop (hypersonic aircraft, single
stage to orbit, anti-gravity paint, or whatever) that is of all-consuming
importance in the conquest of space. Until this technology is ready, manned
space flight is useful for little more than development testing.

The Hall process. This was also a technological breakthrough, but the Hall
process was a private invention, and not famously expensive to develop. The Hall
process revolutionized the aluminum industry, turning it from an exotic material
into something to make disposable soda cans out of. Many technological
breakthroughs, such as the invention of vulcanized rubber, are entirely
accidental.

Steam engines. The development of steam engines during the
industrial revolution was probably closer to pure capitalism than the early
aviation industry. Thus radical libertarians may find steam engines a more
attractive model for space development than the aviation industry. The
development of steam engines was one of gradual improvement involving many
designs by many people over many years, rather than a breakthrough like the Hall
process.

Christopher Columbus-style exploration. There is some
spectacular discovery waiting to be made in space, probably by accident, which
can only be made if humans are on board. This discovery will completely
transform the economics of space travel in unpredictable ways. We can't predict
it, so we just have to get out there and look. This is a popular theme in
science fiction, such as the alien artifact in William Hartmann's Mars
Underground.

Scientific exploration in the style of Charles Darwin's journey on the HMS
Beagle. It's hard to argue that humans are currently more cost-effective than
robots in answering the important specific scientific questions about a place
like Mars, but science is a nice side benefit of a space program. Werner von
Braun looked to the scientific exploration of Antarctica as a model for space
development, depending on the airplane as "enabling technology." I see
Antarctica instead as an example of a scientific research area that never
really became anything more than that.

Exploration in the style of
Captain James Cook.
Columbus' discovery was accidental. He was actually trying to test a
business plan that he hoped would make him some money. Cook, on the other
hand, was deliberately seeking out the unknown to increase general knowledge
(ie. cartography), with no business plan in sight. Human exploration was
cost-effective in this context because no one at the time knew how to build
suitable robots.

Resource exploration. Another meaning for "exploration" is looking for
valuable raw materials in places that have already been discovered, such as
prospecting for silver or exploratory oil drilling. At something like $5000/lb.
to put payloads into low Earth orbit (LEO), and many lbs. of propellant needed
for every lb. of payload to be carried from LEO to anywhere else interesting,
the resource exploration model is hard to take seriously except in conjunction
with some other model that suggests how launch costs can come down.

Private barnstorming (exhibition flying). The X-prize won by Burt Rutan's
team was deliberately patterned after the Orteig prize won by Charles Lindbergh.
Lindbergh's flight was formal exhibition flying rather than "barnstorming," but
they are essentially the same. The immediate outcome of barnstorming may have
been a mixture of public and private entertainment, but barnstorming helped
early aviators pay for their flying time, and the development of advanced
aircraft required a lot of flying (and crashing and performing accident
investigations). The barnstormers were mainly private, but the government
supported the aviation industry through, for example, the National Advisory
Committee on Aeronautics (NACA, NASA's predecessor), which did such things as
publish studies of different airfoil shapes.

Note the contrast between Columbus and Lindbergh. No one claims that
Charles Lindbergh discovered France, and no one can realistically hope that
Mars-bound astronauts will discover a habitable planet.

Subsidized air-mail. The US government also subsidized air-mail. This
enabled the private airline industry to gain experience (ie. more accident
investigations), pay for infrastructure (ie. airports) and pay for the
development of newer aircraft, hastening the day when air travel and air freight
would be able to pull their own economic weight.

The DC-3. The DC-3 seems to illustrate a "threshold" phenomenon, where a
series of minor technological improvements finally pushes an industry financially
from red to black. The DC-3 was not a dramatic technological breakthrough, but
it looked like one economically. The development of the DC-3 might be viewed in
terms of steam engines, as a private development, but subsidies helped create the
market for which it was built.

Henry the Navigator. Prince Henry is credited for developing the technology
that enabled Portuguese ships to sail around Africa to India. This was government
funded commercial technology development. This was a long term effort to
gradually improve ship technology. While it was "enabling" in the sense of
sailing to India, the Portuguese shipping industry already existed and was
profitable in waters closer to home.

Government prize money. Britain offered a prize for the development of an
accurate ship's chronometer. This may have been more for military than
commercial reasons, but it is a model of publicly funding a development project
that requires minimal government oversight.

The X-15. NASA and the Air Force are famous for building experimental "X"
vehicles such as the supersonic X-1 and X-15. Most of these vehicles were built
for military reasons. What I find interesting about them is that they are pure
research vehicles, intended to enable their developers to learn about the
technology, not to be practical commercial or combat aircraft. If you think
you're working on a vehicle like a DC-3, and your co-worker thinks he's working
on a vehicle like an X-15, this could mean big trouble. Arguably, this confusion
is part of what happened to the Space Shuttle.

The US transcontinental railroad. This railroad was nominally private, but
it was heavily government supported. Rather than allowing the industry to develop
naturally or with a general subsidy, the government provided loans, land, and
protection from some legal responsibilities. The government's
reasons (apart from graft)
were largely political and military, to prevent California from seceding and in
order to fight Indians, but there were also monopoly issues.

The Panama canal. In the case of the Panama canal, the US government didn't
just support the construction of the canal, but built the whole thing, including
grabbing the land away from Colombia. The reasons for the government's
involvement were partly military (naval traffic), partly political (getting the
land), and partly monopoly-related. It was a huge public economic development
project, but it had little to do with technology or science.

Holland's dikes. Holland's dikes are similar to the Panama canal in
being an important government program, but one with little to do with
technology. But these dikes are largely a public good that protects people
from environmental disaster. In some ways this is a better model for the
space program than the Panama canal. One of the near-term motives for a
space program is to protect the Earth from natural disasters (ie.
asteroids). One long-term motive is to build colonies that would allow at
least some people and technological infrastructure to survive other kinds of
natural or man-made disasters (ie. biological war).

Potemkin villages. One of Catherine the Great's ministers, Grigory
Aleksandrovich Potemkin, was accused,
apparently
falsely, of having fake villages erected along the Dnieper river in
order to impress her on her riverboat tour of Crimea in 1787. "Potemkin
village" is often used now as a metaphor for an economic development project
that is not economically self-supporting, and nothing particularly good
comes of it, but is touted as a success story. These "successes" may be
seen variously as theatre, psychodrama, or fraud.

Once it became clear that the Space Shuttle would never come anywhere
close to its cost and schedule targets (fly once a week at $7M per flight),
as it certainly had by the time of the Challenger accident, the Shuttle
program for me took on some of the flavor of a Potemkin village. The
International Space Station (ISS) had this flavor from the beginning.

Superpower competition. The Apollo Program has been described as "a
technical solution to a political problem." It was a spectacular display of
technological prowess meant to reassure friends and discourage enemies. It has
also been likened to a steeplechase, a race between two horsemen towards an
arbitrary landmark. As a model of space development, it suffers from the modern
lack of the superpower competition that drove it. Ballistic missiles seem of
little relevance to asymmetric warfare.

Public barnstorming. Recall that I described the role of private barnstorming
as a way for aviators to recover some of the cost of developing an aviation industry.
Governments can play this game, too. The Air Force's exhibition flying team, The
Thunderbirds, also participates in air shows, but they're not a useful model for the
space program; they're a recruiting tool rather than a way for the Air Force to pay
for their flight hours. Instead, I look again to Apollo.

While Apollo may have been motivated largely by superpower competition, it
generated excitement far beyond reassuring people that the US could build large,
sophisticated ballistic missiles. Nowadays, when space enthusiasts think of the
Apollo program, and dream of recreating aspects of it, they tend to think of it
more in terms of this excitement than in terms of the Cold War. In so far as this
excitement is intentional, a society might be said to have "cultural reasons" for
having a space program. Perhaps there is even something vaguely religious about
it. But if the public think they are getting their money's worth of entertainment
out of the space program, and some of the money is going into learning how to build
and operate better spacecraft, this could be a sensible model for space development.

I mentioned earlier my discomfort with the word, "exploration," in the Vision
for Space Exploration (VSE) and in Griffin's paper. "Exploration" invites the
ubiquitous Christopher Columbus analogies. It also seems to have little to do with
the role of NASA's predecessor, NACA, in the development of aviation. I was
thinking of the contrast between Mike Griffin, with his "exploration," and Burt
Rutan, as a seeming throwback to the old barnstorming days, when the old saying
suddenly dawned on me: "An elephant is a mouse built to government specifications."

If we set aside all the rhetoric about exploration, and look at the VSE as a
form of public barnstorming, does it make sense? I think it does, and I find it
attractive for two reasons. First, this public barnstorming approach to space
development, while not my favorite model, is at least plausible--it does not
require me to believe in alien artifacts, anti-gravity paint, or negative interest
rates. Second, Griffin's plan seems to be internally consistent. It does not try
to use the excitement of barnstorming as a justification for building a
transcontinental railroad, or scientific curiosity as a reason for building an oil
pipeline. The minimalist infrastructure reflects this consistency. The VSE pursues
a series of increasingly difficult and novel missions, but it doesn't make long term
commitments to maintaining expensive activity at any of the destinations. It
builds a minimum of infrastructure and puts a minimum of refinement or
specialization in the vehicles it builds. It gathers scientific data, but as with
Apollo, cost-effective science is not the point of the trip.

The public barnstorming model is not my favorite approach. With LEO launch
costs (using expendables) on the order of $5000/lb. (the Shuttle is more), I have
concluded that the Shuttle's original purpose of reducing launch costs was, in
fact, what NASA should have been trying to do all along. I would have preferred
to see NASA go back to its NACA roots, or perhaps build some more X-vehicles,
more with an eye towards operations research than technical performance, trying
to get this cost down. But Griffin's approach to space certainly seems to me
like an improvement over what NASA has been doing since Skylab.

There is bad news in Griffin's plan with respect to reducing launch costs,
but there is also good news. The bad news is that Griffin is not directly
interested in experimenting with any new technology or launch vehicle architecture
that has the potential to reduce launch costs dramatically (ie. reusable launch
vehicles). Nor is Griffin very interested in promoting the private sector launch
industry by following the subsidized air mail model, such as by having NASA act as
an "anchor tenant" in a private space launch market. He was
quoted in The Space
Review as saying,

I cannot put public money at risk, depending on a commercial
provider to be in my series path. He might decide not to show up for good and
valid business reasons. Okay? I can't put return to the moon and crew exploration
vehicle capability, I can't put the ability to send humans into low earth orbit
on behalf of the government at risk, based on whether or not a commercial provider
decides that he actually wants to do it that day. But I can provide mechanisms
where if the commercial provider shows up, the government will stand down and will
buy its service and its capability from the industrial provider and let them have
the competition among themselves.

But in a left-handed way, getting NASA out of the reusable launch vehicle
business may be good news. NASA's track record with the X-33 and development
programs such as the Orbital Space Plane (OSP) leaves much to be desired. These
public programs have not only wasted a lot of money, they have also tended to
discourage private development programs. As the saying goes, "When the elephants
dance, the mice tremble." Griffin is keeping private business decisions out of
the critical path for VSE, but at the same time, whether intentionally or not, he
has removed NASA from the critical path for developing cheap reusable launch
vehicles. Whether you think this is good or bad will likely depend on what
historical models you think are realistic for the government's role in the
conquest of space.

So what models are realistic for the government's role in space? A
realistic model has to stand in the face both of current launch costs on the
order of $5000/lb. and of competition from sophisticated and relatively
inexpensive robotic missions (and telescopes). I have argued that
"exploration" is a bad model unless perhaps one defines "exploration"
broadly enough to include the sort of vicarious joyrides I have described as
"public barnstorming." Massive government economic development projects
(Panama canal model) such as Solar Power Satellites (SPS) are similarly
indefensible at current launch costs. But several other models are still
plausible. I am not convinced that Manhattan-style breakthrough physics or
technology is necessary for a dramatic reduction in cost to LEO, but it
could certainly be helpful. Government subsidized private development (the
air-mail model) is plausible. The private barnstorming (with NACA-style
public support) model is also plausible, especially to those of us who see
current reusable rocket technology as very immature (more like the Wright
Flyer than the DC-3). The public barnstorming model is also plausible. In
fact, it may be that space-related science fiction and fantasy have
sufficiently captured people's imaginations that it is impossible for NASA
to follow any other model without elements of barnstorming entering into the
picture.

It seems to me that much of the public discussion I've seen regarding
the need to get people excited about the space program is an implicit
endorsement of the public barnstorming model. But people seem to be
embarassed to defend this model explicitly--the rhetoric is focused on
exploration. It's as if the nature of barnstorming is that one can't really
admit that one is doing it with public money without taking most of the fun
out of it. It's also quite likely that many space enthusiasts are in denial
about the weakness of the Columbus analogy. But the net effect is that the
manned space community is collectively misrepresenting what the space
program can realistically hope to accomplish, overhyping it in apparent hope
of selling it to an increasingly disappointed and disillusioned public.

This unwillingness to defend Griffin's plans in sensible terms is a
problem because, despite Griffin's relative popularity, there really is not
a consensus within the space community or within Congress that this is the
right way to go. There are lots of other ways to spend the money, and some
people just want the elephants to stop dancing in front of the mouse hole.
Assuming that Congress does fund the VSE appropriately, the inability to
state a sensible rationale for it makes it hard for the people working on it
to tell if they're doing their jobs right (and for people who insist on
seeing "the big picture," it's bad for morale).

Does this exploration hype really help sell the space program? One of
the hallmarks of the dysfunctional corporation in Scott Adams' "Dilbert"
cartoons is that the marketing types are always making promises that the
engineers can't possibly keep. In my opinion, what we need in the space
arena is not "better" marketing to generate more excitement among the
general public. What we need is to be collectively honest with ourselves so
we can figure out which of our hopes and expectations are realistic, and
build a consensus on what it is in the big picture that we are asking the
public to support.

We need to have an intelligent public discussion about what we're
trying to do with the manned space program. I challenge both supporters and
opponents of the VSE to state clearly what model they think NASA should be
trying to follow, and defend it in the context of $5000/lb. launch costs and
cheap robots.

Again, these are my personal opinions. I emphatically do NOT speak for my
employer.

1. Footnote on "exploration:"

The way manned space advocates use the word "exploration" strikes me as a bit of a shell game. The first shell is to use exploration as a euphemism for "stunt" (like Charles Lindbergh). The second shell is to claim that exploration means "science" (like James Cook). The third shell is to claim that it means something like "prospecting" (pursuing a business plan like Christopher Columbus). Skeptics can argue against any of these forms of manned space "exploration" as not being cost effective, but unless they make all of these arguments simultaneously, with numbers, and add the numbers up, manned space advocates can exploit the ambiguity by telling them that they don't understand what "exploration" really means.